Data Scientist in Van Wyck, SC | Taking it one day at a time

Why I'm the person for @stevebuttry's next job

By Chip Oglesby April 08, 2010

Quick on the heels of Jeff Sonderman’s announcement about joining allbrittion, I learned they’re hiring a social media producer, a job that was written for me! Below, I’ve written a few bullet points fleshing out why I think Steve should hire me for this job.

If you agree with me, be sure to send a tweet to [@stevebuttry](http://www.twitter.com/stevebuttry) letting him know that he should #hirechip!

From managing these accounts, I’ve learned that interaction is best. It’s great when someone asks a question and realizes that there’s a human being on the other side that is listening. Social Media goes much further than just listening though, it’s also about immediacy, which is why we’re getting news much faster on twitter than through traditional news services and the Associated Press.

I also manage fan pages for The State and SMC Columbia.

Monitoring and responding to social media references to our work;

I kept a close eye on @thestate during the coverage of Mark Sanford and we used twitter to help identify Joe Wilson as the “You Lie” commenter, giving us a jump on our local competition for the story.

Aggregating social media content for linking to or posting on our site; promoting our content and community-engagement opportunities using social media;

We crowd-sourced storm photos for thestate.com and fan photos during the Kenny Chesney concert. We’ve also used twitter to collect photos from accident scenes as well as football games. We also aggregate tweets at sporting events based on their physical location for our @thestatesports accout.

Using Twitter and other social media to crowdsource breaking news stories, supplementing staff coverage;

We used @thestate and @gogamecocks to post breaking news of Ben Axon, a USC recruit charged with simple marijuana possesion. We also used the account during the Travis Barker/DJ AM plane crash, Mark Sanford coverage, Michael Phelps marijunana saga, coverage of Joe Wilson’s “You Lie” comment and other small breaking news events in the area.

The biggest help with breaking news came with Twitter’s location API, we are now able to search certain areas for tweets related to events.

I’ve also used Qik on iPhones to stream live video from house fires in 2009.

Other accomplishments include conceiving and implementing the use of other social media tools including Cover it Live.

CIL was most recently used in the the USC Baseball tournament which was lead by Neil White and Dwayne McLemore and with the Soccer State Championships lead by Akaliah Nelson and I.

Both of these examples have a high return on investment for our website.

Planning tweetups and other social-media-oriented community events.

As president of Social Media Club Columbia, we hold regular tweetups and events for our community in Columbia. In October of 2009, we held our largest meeting about the future of journalism with Dan Conover, Doug Fisher, Holly Bounds, Adam Beam, myself and Jeff Elder. You can find more here: http://bit.ly/1wmEMr

In addition to my work responsibilities, I’m also an award winning photographer. You can view my work here: http://bit.ly/8NB7AZ

I was also a first round finalist in the this years Knight News Challenge with my idea for Augmented Reality using data relationships. You can read that here: http://bit.ly/39Zc00

The thing that intrigues me most right now is location based services. I feel like newspapers have a really great opportunity to harness LBS for news. Everyblock is a start, but I imagine something more granular than that. You can read about that here: http://bit.ly/5NzoX9

I’ve also been very critical over the media’s (mis)-use of twitter. I’ve written numerous position papers for my company on what we can do to better harness social media and most of those efforts went unnoticed. http://bit.ly/397JLR